I understand that a good deal of our arms sales are under the table, so to speak. But a lot of it is unclassified, I believe. I don’t get very far Googling. Approximately what part of our budget is devoted to arms sales? How much of our GNP does it comprise? How much of our economy rests on it? How big is it, anyway? Sort of a big question - I don’t know how to pose it any other way, I suppose. Is the Master listening?
Well, there’s a few ways to figure arms sales. I’ll use 2002 data because it is easily available. Cites are all available here. There are lots of other competing figures that measure arms sales in different ways, so damn near any other figure you google will result in comparing apples to oranges. I chose these cites because the criteria are pretty consistent across the different types of sales.
Anywho, first, there’s government-to-government arms sales. That’s in the neighborhood of $10 billion. Then there’s commercial military sales, both articles and services, in which a company contracts with another country. That’s about $52 billion. There’s a few other cats and dogs that add up to another $100 million or so, which is really a rounding error when we’re talking about these numbers. 
So add all that up, and that’s what… about one half of one percent of our entire economy. However, the US is substantially the leader in dollar amount of arms sales per year (due in part because our weapons are so incredibly expensive), to the tune of the US having a hand in roughly 40% of the value of world arms sales.
By “arms sales”, do you mean exports from the United States, or all sales within the United States, including sales to our own military? When people speak of “arms sales”, they’re usually referring to the former, so I’ll start from that assumption.
Arms exports can take either of two forms–“Direct Commercial Sales”, in which an American company sells arms to a foreign government (with the permission of our government, of course), or “Foreign Military Sales” in which our government sells directly to a foreign government.
Here is a source of information about arms sales; see especially the Section 655 reports to Congress. It appears that DCS equalled $24.3 billion in 2005 (most recent year available) and FMS equalled $13.1 billion in 2004.
The total of $37.4 billion equals 0.3% of our GDP of $11.75 trillion.
I’m not certain, but I believe FMS’s would show up as both a revenue and an expense item in the federal budget. (The Defense Department buys the weapons from a contractor, then sells them to a foreign country.) Since this nets out to zero, it doesn’t make sense to speak of it as a percentage of the budget.
For purposes of comparison, however, the US defense procurement budget is $78 billion, the total defense budget is $419 billion, and the total federal budget is about $2.7 trillion.
If we consider domestic procurement and foreign sales together, total weapons production of either $102 billion or $115 billion (depending on how they account for FMS) equals about 0.9% of GDP.
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Both of those previous posts are enormously informative and helpful. Thank you very much. I think this bbs is the greatest. You have told me that in the grossest terms, arms sales could amount to someplace between .5 and .9% of our economy, which is essentially what I was trying to ask. Thank you.
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When I read those posts, the advertisement at the bottom of the page was for a company that sells assistance with Humor Writing. I wonder what words or phrases triggered that ?
That one shows up a lot. I think it’s just one of the things Google uses when it hasn’t yet figured out what ads would really fit.
Not on Firefox it doesn’t!
I have my browser set to block these, and similar pop-up ads; and I’m quite happy not to be bothered by that junk.
Try the term “guns and butter”.